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Dragon Ball (anime)
Dragon Ball (ドラゴンボール, Doragon Bōru) is an adaptation of the first portion of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball manga. It is composed of 153 20-minute episodes and ran on Fuji TV from February 26, 1986 to April 12 1989. The series average rating was 21.2%, with its maximum being 29.5% (Episode 047) and its minimum being 13.7% (Episode 110). Dragon Ball was overshadowed by its successor Dragon Ball Z. Dragon Ball depicted Goku's childhood, while Dragon Ball Z depicted his adulthood. Both are adapted from the same manga. Production history Original Series Dragon Ball started off as a manga series called Dragon Boy. The story depicted a young boy named Tanton and his quest to return a princess to her homeland. The series was a loose adaptation of the Chinese legend Journey to the West, depicting monkey king Sun Wukong. Due to the series' unpopularity, Toriyama re-wrote Dragon Boy, adapting it as Dragon Ball. All the character's personalities were changed except for Vegeta. The re-adaptation named Dragon Ball became a hit. Broadcast Two previous attempts at releasing Dragon Ball to United States audiences failed. The first attempt was in 1989 from Harmony Gold (the company had previously dubbed Clash of the Planets and Voltron). It featured strange name changes for nearly all the characters, such as changing Vegeta to Zero and Korin to Whiskers the Wonder Cat. It was test-marketed in several cities, but was never broadcast to the general public; therefore it is referred to as "The Lost Dub" by fans. The second and more well-known attempt was in 1995 with only the first 13 episodes dubbed and aired in first-run syndication. This release was put out by FUNimation Entertainment and utilized BLT Productions for the dubbing. These original 13 dubbed episodes were later released to DVD by KidMark as "Dragon Ball: The Saga of Vegeta." After Dragon Ball Z became immensely popular on Cartoon Network's Toonami block, the entire series was translated into English by FUNimation's in-house ADR studio for redistribution in the U.S. The complete series aired on Cartoon Network's Toonami from August 20, 2001 to December 1, 2003. Unlike the theme songs for Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT, FUNimation made English versions of the original Japanese opening (OP) and ending (ED) themes for these episodes and left in the original background music. Some insert (IN) songs were taken out or have talking over them. Censorship U.S. version of Dragon Ball that was aired on Cartoon Network (before that, it was aired in syndication and the NBC in 1987 to 1990) had many edits done to it. Most of the edits were digital cosmetic changes, which were done to remove nudity and blood, and dialogue edits. Sometimes, some scenes were deleted altogether, either to save time or cut out strong violence. A lot of fans hated these changes, because they felt it was butchering the original show's humor and dumbing it down. These edits, however, were necessary in order to have the show aired on TV. The DVDs do not contain these edits.